In general I do not like to play online with strangers in mmo's for various reasons, one of them is the lack of co-operation, another is that I'd rather explore on my own at my own pace. However in this game there seemed like potential for those times which I do want social interaction and it feel pretty flat. You can't just talk to anyone in the world out loud which makes sense or everyone would be talking at once. You can do this in a group setting, but there is no chat system for those without mics or who don't want to wake up their household at night which I did not like. There are some kind of alliance wars but to be honest I couldn't understand what any of the alliance quests/wars were saying and therefore have not tried it. You don't have to group with others to help them or be helped which is great because as I wander the world I may come across a foe hard to beat and someone just strolls along and aids me. This is both good and bad. If I just wanted to beat it by myself then they kinda stole the glory. Its especially weird when facing bosses out in the open world. Yes the boss dose re-spawn but that kinda ruins the epic-ness of boss battles.
Then you have the character leveling, which falls short of expectations. First you only get to choose to up your magic, health or stamina by 1 each level up, whereas in most rpg's you automatically get a boost to health and other stats each level. Instead this game relies too heavily on armor to grant all of your physical and spell resistance which I feel is a bit unfair. Then you can pick one "skill" to unlock,morph or upgrade. This falls short as well since they are grouping spells, weapons attacks, a special moves into the term "skills" along with other mundane skills like crafting and provisioning. The only thing that makes this a bit better is the fact some quests will grant a skill point and you can find secret shards that can be collected to earn more skill points.
Speaking of crafting and provisioning, I actually want to like crafting in games but this one is just too mundane, too much research too many research requisites. In fact you can't just research one type of improvement and then use it on all your gear you craft. Nope, you have to research that same improvement on every single type of armor and type of weapon to do it. Crafting is for the extremely patient but yields little in the way of rewards. Gather supplies is too hard it takes too long and it's too hard to find them. Even when you make something you must level up your "skills" in these crafts to be able to make anything decent an by the time you do you can just find things better than you can make in most cases. Crafting requires too much junk basically and it takes up WAAAAY too much space in inventory and bank. Provisioning should have come with some kind of bag that doesn't count towards inventory space. I also noticed you cant buy anything you need to upgrade or enhance crafts, no you must instead deconstruct an sacrifice already made armor and weapons to get those supplies.
Ok let's talk merchants and guilds. So basically the merchants sell things that are way too expensive to buy, especially the horse stables, the horses are really out of control expensive. The merchants don't pay squat for your goodies, and pay even less for things you crafted. In some cases the items I crafted are worth less than the cost to make them. Merchants also won't give any gold for a majority of the items and supplies found. That's irritating because you spend all day gathering things and can't even sell your left overs for a bit of gold. The stores are basically all the same. Nothing new or exciting to see or buy, not that you could afford anything if there was. The base game "guilds" are not even really guilds. You are not really a member with other real players in those guilds, for instance the mages guild. It basically means nothing and no benefit to being a guild member except a few guild skills. In other ES games being a part of the guild opened up a whole inside world of things only members could do I was disappointed. As far as player guilds go the only way to join is to start your own and randomly invite people, or be randomly invited by others. There is no way to ask to join or see a list of guilds. You can open a guild bank with 10 members and bid on a guild store location against other guilds to sell your wares or crafts, but you have to have 50 members, out bid other guilds and then you get to sell for only a week. There are no other public venues to sell crafts or surplus goodies. I think that's boring.
Quests. I like the quests ok in general but the quest icons are annoying. Even when I choose one quest it still wants to show me icons for quests I'm not doing. That gets confusing and sometimes I end up accidentally doing a different quest. What I do not like about quests is that in a group they can do a quest but it doesn't mean I've completed it. I may have to do the quest on my own also. Not real synced together in my opinion.
One other issues with the game is it's extremely large and it's updates are huge. The most recent one came out today at a whopping 13GB! It's getting to the point where they will have to slow down or my had drive own't be able to support the game anymore and that means I can't play at all if I can't update which I hate. Personally I would have preferred this be an offline game where I can invite friends and have some option multiplayer modes and interactions.
The graphics are excellent and sound is ok but nothing memorable. The game has some quirks but all in all is a good to play for real time battle. As a mage I can say this battle system is a 5000% improvement on the horror that was the battle UI of Skyrim. So if you are looking for something big something fun, something somewhat interactive, this game is a decent one. I gave it the score I did because overall it's fun and you don't have to craft if you don't want to.